"In the six months since we launched Raspberry Pi, we've received a lot of feedback about the original board design. Over the next few weeks, we'll be gradually rolling out a new revision 2.0 PCB which incorporates some of the most popular suggestions." Also: manufactured in the UK.

Some nice updates; Glad it finally has some mounting holes.
I really wish they had moved the ethernet port out or the usb port in though so they'd be flush with each other...
That side of the board is random oddness that sucks if you want it in a decent looking case.

Farnell, RS and Maplin are all leading retailers. Granted the first two are not household names, but they're huge component resellers. And honestly, would you really expect the Pi to be sold in places like PC World or Argos? It would be like popping into Tesco to buy a soldering iron or shopping at B&Q for pasta.

I'm holding on until they start selling them including casing. I've already done that mistake when I bought the BeagleBoard xM. It was fun to play around with but it is hard to find any real usage for it as it was.

Also something that I'm kinda worried about is that if you have it runnning on USB power and then plug in another USB peripheral like a keyboard it might stop operating properly because it might drain to much power from the chip. A friend of mine had this problem. Has anyone else experienced this?

I think it must depend on your intentions as to whether or not a premanufactured case makes any sense.

The RPi that I'm using as a multimedia center on my television requires a powered USB hub for my wifi dongle and to attach an external hard drive. A case that only houses the board would look odd as all these other large items come cascading off of it. My Lego case was easy to customize to house everything for that.

But, the RPi I keep in my office at work would be easy to throw in a premanufactured case since I mostly use it to run remote apps and save data on the network drives.

A discussion thread on the news item about UK manufacturing just caught my eyes. It started with someone mentioning that it was ironical that Sony manufactured such a relatively open-ended device, considering their long history of product lockdown (SonicStage, Memory Stick, BMG rootkit, OtherOS removal...).

But it has occured to me that I have seen few news on such bullshit from Sony recently. To the contrary, they have opened up their phone bootloaders, used MicroSD cards on them, handed the required blobs to Google for Xperia S support in AOSP, and now manufacture RPis...

Have they finally learned something about the importance of geek PR in the modern computing landscape ?

Aside the Pi, all of those are phone developments and it's been well documented in the past that Sony's mobile phone branch is "less evil" than the rest of the company (which could be attributed, if just in part, to Erricson's influence).